In general, the present invention relates to an information-processing apparatus, an information-processing method, an accounting-processing apparatus, an accounting-processing method and a recording medium. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information-processing apparatus, an information-processing method, an accounting-processing apparatus and an accounting-processing method which allow accounting to be settled either on a data-transmitting side or a data-receiving side in a transmission of data through a network, as well as relates to recording media for storing implementations of the information-processing method and the accounting-processing method.
In recent years, a variety of contents such as audio and video data is generally exchanged through the Internet which has been becoming popular.
By the way, the cost or the fee of a content transmission through the conventional Internet is generally borne by the beneficiary. Consider as an example a case in which a content is downloaded from a server to a user. In this case, the cost of the content is borne by the user serving as a recipient of the content without regard to whether the processing to transmit the data is carried out by the server or a terminal receiving the data.
By the way, in the case of a content exchanged among terminals instead of a content downloaded from a server to a terminal, which form a server-terminal pair, it is not necessarily appropriate to charge the cost of the content to a terminal receiving the content. In the conventional system, however, a party supposed to bear the cost of an exchanged content is determined in advance. In some cases, there is thus raised a problem of difficulty to freely set a party supposed to bear the cost of an exchanged content.